Drones take flight in Florida

Just a breeze tickled the top of the earthen dike high above Lake Okeechobee, which made flight conditions ideal for a drone that Tom Spencer gripped like a javelin.

"Three, two ..." another crewman counted as the craft's propeller snarled to life. At "one," Spencer heaved the drone into the sky. On white wings spanning 10 feet, it soared like a brilliant bird past black buzzards spiraling above the dike.

The moment wasn't the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, but it megaphoned the message that drones have moved beyond the military and rolled up their sleeves for workaday tasks. Making, selling and flying aerial robots is taking off, even if the nation hasn't yet set workplace rules for drones.

"There are a lot of great uses for them," said Spencer, operations leader for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers team from Jacksonville, which flew the Florida-made craft this week to photograph erosion in the aging Okeechobee dike.

What they can do will be showcased this week in Orlando at the world's largest drone event, with 600 exhibits of drone wares that could be used by cops, farmers and ecologists – for "dirty, dangerous or difficult" missions and for tasks such as tending orange groves, peeking into an industrial fire or measuring beach erosion.

Nearly 8,000 people are expected to attend the 41st conference and trade show of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Day-of tickets will cost more than $1,000, and the public is not invited.

Currently, only military and public agencies, including universities, are allowed to fly working drones; the Federal Aviation Administration is formulating regulations for commercial users.

The industry is surging with competitors, each vying to show that their technology and approach should be the model for the new rules.

"It's a really hot topic," said Matthew Burgess, a University of Florida coordinator for wildlife research using drones.

But the flying camera used at Lake Okeechobee last week is called a drone by the company that made it, Altavian Inc. of Gainesville.

Altavian traces its beginning to the early 2000s at the University of Florida. School scientists and engineers developed the aerodynamics, skin, propulsion, electronics and payloads of the drone now called the Nova.

A group of those involved formed Altavian in 2011, licensed the technology and figured out how to make and sell Novas to buyers like the Corps of Engineers.

The Altavian website proclaims: "Drones work for you now."

"It's a tool for people to go out and get data better, faster and cheaper than they have before," said Thomas Rambo, Altavian's chief operating officer.

As coordinator of UF wildlife research using drones, Burgess flies a Nova to observe brown pelicans nesting near Cedar Key and to document whether the birds are bothered by the overflights.

Drone engineers and scientists at UF will continue to improve the Nova's performance, but there is also a parallel challenge, Burgess said.

"We're trying to document the pros and cons of things it can do in comparison to existing methods to do the same work, whether it's with satellites, manned flight or on the ground," Burgess said.

The Nova scouting the Okeechobee dike last week was there because the previous method of making sure the 30-foot-tall dam wasn't at risk of bursting was to send three engineers to walk every foot of its 143 miles.

"That got to be too costly," said Spencer, the launcher of the Nova drone.

If the Nova does an affordable job, it also stands to get reliable results.

It can be programmed to make the same passes over the same parts of the dike year after year. Its camera shoots high-definition photos that are blended into three-dimension images.

The drone weighs 15 pounds, wields the brain power of a smart phone, costs as much as a luxury car and runs on an electric motor that spins up to ferocious thrust in an instant.

On the ground, the aircraft mutters with an incessant self-adjusting of its controls, a serious noise conveying that the machine is no toy. But for a drone like Nova, the job can be a breeze.

On a summer day when vultures ride hot updrafts, the Nova will briefly turn off its motor and also surf the thermals.